Monday, October 01, 2007

Visual Language and Wicked Problems - 4

This is the fourth in a series of "blogicles" on how Mess Mapping™ and Resolution Mapping™ processes can be used to represent, analyze, evaluate Wicked Problems and then to choose actions that ameliorate the Wicked Problem at hand.

The diagram above shows the key ideas. Certainly, pictures and words
have been combined together in documents since the invention of written
language, and especially in ancient Egypt. Horn says that the full
integration of words, images, and shapes into a single, unified
communication unit continues to emerge as a distinct language. The
emergence and evolution of visual language has been substantially
driven by computers, cell phones, PDAs, and other communication devices
with graphic interfaces and graphic, image and video tools.

Words are essential to visual language. They give conceptual
shape to communication and supply the capacity to name, define, and
classify elements and to discuss abstractions.

Images, of course, are what we first think of when we think
of visual language. But without integration with words and/or shapes,
images are only conventional visual art, not visual language as Horn
uses the term.

Shapes are different from images. They are more abstract. For
several centuries, we have been combining them with words to form
diagramming systems. The study of shapes and their integration with
words and/or images is an essential part of visual language.

Visual Language is not about images by themselves, or shapes by
themselves, but about the use of images, shapes, and words to create
messages comprised of integrated elements.

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This is the fourth in a series of "blogicles" on how Mess Mapping™ and Resolution Mapping™ processes can be used to represent, analyze, evaluate Wicked Problems and then to choose actions that ameliorate the Wicked Problem at hand.